Zorg

The in game designation PL20-X3 is based on the RL-20 P3 design. It was Pratt & Whitney's early concept of a staged combustion cycle engine in the J2 thrust class. P&W were investigating the staged combustion cycle at a time when Rocketdyne was mostly interested in J2 nozzle improvements and aerospikes. Not much came of the RL20 design although it was seen in a handful of Saturn MLV documents as a future J2 replacement. Pratt & Whitney's staged combustion efforts evolved into the XLR-129 (which is also modelled in game) which went into component testing as it was developed for the ISINGLASS spyplane. Later the 129 was the basis for their SSME proposal and was the presumed leader throughout most of the competition until the thrust requirement went up and Rocketdyne won with their proposal. Thats a long story in and of itself. Anyway for the RL20, both sea level and vacuum optimised versions were looked at.

Thanks! Just wanted to note though that the previous one was modelled by PickledTripod and textured by Cobalt. It was a strange time when the US and Russia were quite cooperative and the US gov was interested in keeping Russian rocket engineers employed lest they go to less desirable destinations increasing proliferation risks. Plus the RD170 family (to which the RD180 belongs) remains to this day among the most performant sea level booster engines out there.

so the red ring there is an untextured placeholder (The ring is a toggle and will be part of the mount switches). But the texturing of the engine proper is just about complete apart from emissives. The text is also placeholder, exact wording and positioning could be different in the final one. For the bare engine there will also be a toggleable LOX pipe extension that will go up and and turn back inwards which should enable some kit bash options hopefully.

Yes this is for BDB1. The KSP2 situation being a bit more clear now (its not ready for BDB as we need a lot more functionality for BDB to work, either in the base game or through supporting mods), we have decided to continue with new projects for KSP1 in the meantime. Finding resources for engines can sometimes be hard, the other Atlas engines although overall simpler designs were more challenging to model as I had to go off of fewer pictures of complete engines and no orthographic schematics. The RD180 on the other hand is one of the most well documented engines. ps. yes I will be texturing the engine as well.

There is one bit of Atlas V (and Atlas III in particular) I am working on right now though

Yes eventually. That's a separate project by Invader not part of the current work I'm doing.

Some more core tank stuff Atlas II-AS: There are some variations on the length of the lox pipe that fall between Atlas II and Atlas D but not sure thats feasible texture space wise unless I can come up with some clever UV trick or something. Atlas III: These are all WIP of course and more details and tweaks to come. But as things stand these two plus the four I posted earlier will make up the core tank mesh variations.

yeah I know thanks. That's why I said the Atlas III variant still needs to be done. I havent scrapped anything. Are you talking about the scientific passenger pods launched on the side of the base tank? OR the weird flat fairing for OV-1 with side opening doors? (both are planned in any case)

Uh maybe but probably not. Completely unique UVs for the core tanks is going to hit texture space quite hard as it is and the early A skirt as opposed to the later one shared with B and C is very niche.

Some work on the booster skirt and core tank variations Atlas ABC, Early Atlas D, Later Atlas D and subsequent derivatives, Atlas E/F Gonna need at least another core tank variant for Atlas III and probably Atlas II and Atlas I (maybe). Atlas D close up Atlas E/F close up

Some more Atlas engine progress. This is the MA3 power pack for Atlas E/F which had fully independent LR89 booster engines. As such the booster skirt had a different shape for packaging compared to other Atlases. As already discussed, for the other LR89/RS-56OBA models, the shared power head was not practical to model so this simplified chamber will be provided. There will be mesh switches on the booster skirt for the exhaust from the implied shared turbo pumps. This is the MA2 power pack as an example.

Sure thing if you can find a reliable source for those stats. I havent looked at LR-101 in any detail yet.

I seriously thought about doing the combined version but after due consideration it just poses a lot of problems and complexity. The powerhead is very complicated to model and different in each version, presents problems with node attachment (not insurmountable but unnecessarily annoying), the mounting hardware would be quite difficult for generic use etc. The plan then is just to model MA1, MA2, MA5 and MA5A as single engines with just the chamber and the relevant pipes just going up and off to the side. MA3 (Atlas E/F) will be fully modelled with its independent powerhead of course. There will also be mesh switches on the booster skirt for different pipes as well as a unique variant for E/F You can see the overall plan here: https://github.com/CobaltWolf/Bluedog-Design-Bureau/issues/974 You can take a look at the craft file to see how its put together correctly. If you downloaded the mod from CKAN you can get the craft files from our spacedock download.

So just to let you all know I'm not dead and that work has started on the next project Below are 3 variations of the LR-105 Atlas sustainer engine. From left to right they represent NA3, NA5 and the last represents NA6, NA7 and RS56 OSA. This is still early work in progress and theres some fixes and adjustments still due. Also the powerhead is largely based on photos of an Atlas E NA6 so all the small details around there wont be accurate to every version but its broadly representative. Anyway just wanted to share since it beginning to look like something.

Something I thought about doing but its on hold for now.

Booster skirt jettison on most Atlas versions is optimal at a point where the Sustainer stage will be left with around 1:1 TWR. I think some of the performance charts are linked in the BDB wiki but otherwise you can check for yourself by defueling the rocket with the skirt removed until you get 1.0 twr. Then attach the skirt and the starting vac TWR you see is when to jettison. In the included BDB Mercury Atlas craft file this is at 3.56 TWR. Also the tower is jettisoned after skirt sep. With Mechjeb PVG| 32 degrees| 110x150km| booster pitch rate 0.5deg/s| booster pitch start 50m/s| I was able to reach orbit with over 700m/s dv left launching from the cape in KSRSS reborn.

One of the Orion 50 models, I forget the designation. The build is also missing the 3rd stage cos I was in a rush but don't tell anyone (that would be a shorter Orion 50).

Should work if you get a direct link to the image ending in .png .jpg etc. Can even just paste the link into the text directly and it will auto embed in the forum. If you post your module manager log and config cache might be able to find the culprit. But if you dont have any LS mods that looks relatively harmless. I guess a rogue LS patch in another mod is triggering the BDB patch incorrectly.

I dont have a full timeline as the documentation I have are from the later years but best I can tell it started out exclusively assuming a Gemini crew vehicle but then morphed to an Apollo baseline by the mid 60s. Do you have Kerbalism? If so that needs to be fixed on their side. But in the meantime it should be relatively harmless. I believe this means that when you switch to the double sized radiators you will not get double cooling power until this conflict is fixed. Not great but also wont kill your game.

1.5 and 1.25m fairings for Taurus/Minotaur C. The 1.25 is new and the 1.5 is the same as Minotaur IV.

Just merged the new IVAs into the 1.11 dev branch. Some might need a few more props and a handful have placeholder textures (will be done properly maybe in June when I have time) but most are quite usable and the hero ones like the ETS Lab module and the historical Skylab MDA are quite complete.

Its a lot more work than you think, would need some very tedious work with collider variants and would conflict with the new IVAs. Those issues are solvable albeit would require more work than I'm motivated to do right now but putting that aside cutting it down to bottom of the black base would 100% interfere with the new IVAs that were made recently.

Thats a possibility for KSP2 eventually but no plans right now.

no such plans for a switch on the ERM sorry.

No I'm not really planning on anything for the bay, feel free to put in anything you like. SIM bay and other Skylab/AAP science makes sense thematically.